Trending News: Why Your Porn Viewing Habits Are Not As Secret As You Might Think

Why Is This Important?

Long Story Short

If you are watching online porn in 2015, you should expect that at some point your viewing history will be publicly released and attached to your name.

Long Story

If you are watching porn online in 2015, even in incognito mode, you should expect in the future that your porn viewing history will be attached to your name and released out into the public domain. So says San Francisco software engineer, Brett Thomas, in a blog post titled “Online Porn Could Be the Next Big Privacy Scandal.”

Thomas’s theory makes plenty of sense. Each internet user’s browser has a unique configuration, which broadcasts information that can be used to identify you as you surf the web. You’re leaving fingerprints all over the websites you visit, essentially, and a digital expert could match the prints on any mainstream site with that MILF hunting den you like to call your second home.

It’s all to do with the internet’s relationship with third-party requests. When you visit any website, you’re sending third party requests to Google and affiliated tracking companies. Hence why you buy some shoes and suddenly the internet constantly shows you pairs of freakin' shoes. Sheesh.

Thomas claims that this culture of third party requests is in lockstep with a rise in casual hacking, exposing people everywhere to the threat of having their porn history published online by anyone who might have an axe to grind.

It’s a scary prospect, so Vice gathered some comment from both Pornhub — by many metrics the biggest porn site on the internet — as well as a couple of privacy experts. Vice also ran privacy app Ghostery on a bunch of websites, including Pornhub, XHamster, XVideos, XXNX and Redtube, revealing each had tracking elements installed.

Their report is essential reading, but the takeaway is this: porn or no porn, the internet and anonymity just don’t mix anymore.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question:Is the onus on the porn sites to protect our anonymity, or at least make it clear when they can’t guarantee our anonymity?

Disrupt Your Feed: Will there be a penny dropping moment where the public suddenly understands and fights back against the sale of their privacy?

Drop This Fact: According to the Vice story, XVideos is the 43rd most visited website in the world. Gmail is 66th. Netflix is 53rd.